On the Selling of the Egyptian Coup to Liberals

Immediately after the Egyptian military ousted Mohamed Morsi on July 3, supporters of the army’s actions began circulating a YouTube video of twelve-year-old Ali Ahmed, a well-dressed and articulate young man whose comments they cited as evidence that the overthrow of an elected president wasn’t a coup but a shining example of democracy. The video, which went out under titles like “12 Year Old Egyptian Explains Revolution in Minutes,” “Egypt: The Next President,” and “Brilliant Egyptian Boy Explains What’s Happening in His Country,” had been filmed six months earlier in Cairo by a news outlet called El Wady.

Who can resist adorable little Ali Ahmed? He comes across as an ardent champion of democracy and gender equality; indeed, it’s striking how deeply he seems to care about these issues. “We didn’t get rid of a military regime to replace it with a fascist theocracy,” he says. “The social objectives of the revolution are yet to be achieved — economic empowerment, freedom and social justice.”

Let’s pretend that these are genuinely Ali’s spontaneous thoughts, and that he wasn’t coached by adults or merely parroting their sentiments. It’s obvious from the video that he comes from Egypt’s tiny upper class, which under normal circumstances interacts with poor Egyptians only rarely. As a commentator on Egyptian social life, he has all the credibility of Richie Rich being interviewed on CNN about the plight of the American working class. Worse, though, is the way people in Egypt and America are using him to try to justify what was clearly a military coup as part of a democratic “revolution,” in turn legitimizing the subsequent mass killings of Islamists by the Egyptian army. This is especially pathetic when the supporters are Western liberals, who have deluded themselves into believing — as some once believed that military intervention was a route to democracy in Iraq and Libya — that American-style secularists have significant popular appeal in Egypt.

The truth is that the secularists beloved of the American political class have little support among Egyptians. Mohammed ElBaradei, who settled for the post of vice president after the military initially chose him to lead the “interim” regime, had returned to the country after the mass demonstrations that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. “If [people] want me to lead the transition, I will not let them down,” he said at the time. But the people didn’t want him to lead. Though he declared his intention to run for the presidency, he withdrew when it became clear he didn’t have anywhere near the support he would need to be elected, and Morsi ultimately won the race in 2012.[1]

[1] In a post-coup interview with the New York Times in which he defended the arrests of Muslim Brotherhood members and the shutdown of Islamist television, ElBaradei said, “We just lost two and a half years. As Yogi Berra said, ‘It’s déjà vu all over again,’ but hopefully this time we will get it right.”

In Egypt, only two forces genuinely possess the ability to rule at the moment: the army, by virtue of the bayonet; or the Muslim Brotherhood, by virtue of the ballot. Morsi angered many (including his own supporters) with his actions, but he was also facing down the impossible expectations of a populace desperate for change after decades of military rule, and he had not lost his legitimacy. Parliamentary elections had been scheduled for later this year; those elections were the proper vehicle for a change of government, not a coup.

Whether the Muslim Brotherhood would have been defeated in elections is unknown. Western media accounts have said that as many as 33 million people had protested against Morsi before the coup, but as Shadi Hamid, director of research for the Brookings Doha Center, told the Washington Post, that number “defies what we know of physical spaces.” Certainly huge numbers of people took to the streets to demonstrate against Morsi, but his supporters have also been out in huge numbers, before and after the coup, and unlike his enemies they are risking their lives to do so.

This isn’t an endorsement of the Muslim Brotherhood, many of whose policies and ideas I find abhorrent, especially regarding civil liberties. But I am quite certain that General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the man who appears to be in charge now and who provoked last weekend’s bloodbath, is also not a fan of gays and feminists (who didn’t thrive under Mubarak, either).[2]

[2] On a past reporting trip to Egypt, I met with female members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and while they might not have classified themselves as feminists as we define the term in the West, they were certainly feminist in their aims. They believed they could work through the Brotherhood to achieve political change, and to improve the status of women in Egypt.

We may not like the Muslim Brotherhood, but we can’t have democracy in Egypt without it, and the same holds true for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. As I wrote for Harper’s in 2007 after interviewing senior officials in the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah, the U.S. government needs to deal with “radical” Islamists because they are widely supported actors in their countries. The alternative to giving them a fair share of power is mass arrests and executions.

Of course, some coup supporters seem to be perfectly comfortable with such tactics. As David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, “Radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. Many have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets. They have a strange fascination with a culture of death.” And as the Washington Post noted yesterday, the response in Egypt and abroad, including from the Obama Administration “has been fairly muted,” despite the fact that a Human Rights Watch investigation found that many of the demonstrators killed over the weekend “had been shot in the chest or head by live ammunition.” The Post article went on to lay bare the dynamic at work: “The brutality of Egypt’s once-feared security state helped spark Egypt’s 2011 revolution. Now those security forces are swinging back into action, and this time they are being hailed as heroes by many of the secular activists and liberals who once campaigned against them.”

You cannot preach about democracy then accept the outcome only if your side triumphs. In 2006, Hamas won a devastating victory in legislative elections in the Palestinian Authority. The following year, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas dissolved a Hamas-led unity government and swore in an emergency cabinet, leading the Obama Administration to reinstate aid that had been suspended under Hamas’ rule. This type of hypocrisy heightens anti-Americanism, sends the message that elections are meaningless, and encourages terrorism.[3]

On Sunday, I came across this line from Voltaire in the documentary The Act of Killing: “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” Though the film is about events in Indonesia in 1965, it brought to mind the intellectual contortions of Egyptian-coup supporters who have justified the mass killings of Islamists in the name of democracy. Back in 1965 it was Islamic militias killing Communists in the name of democracy. The common denominator is that the killers were seen as pro-Western — and so, the trumpets are sounding once again in America.

A Pro-Military Coup demonstrator using a unique method to express how glad he is to be literally trod upon my a military boot.

As humiliating, cringeworthy and gut wrenching as the image is, one must admit that this gentleman captured the reality of events quite perfectly. Some within Egyptian society do strive to remain enslaved to the powerful and corrupt. It’s the only thing they know and it’s the only way they will feel content and secure

However, for the rest of the Egyptian people, their destiny will inevitably be freedom, dignity and honour; not only for themselves but for everyone including this poor fool and his ilk, whether he and they like it or not.

callmeback

Here is a list by Max Blumenthal summarizing the tweets of famous arab liberals after the massacre.

“Eight months pregnant I told an old woman sitting beside me on the bus that the egg that hatched my baby came from my wife’s ovaries. I didn’t know how the old woman would take it; one can never know. She was delighted: That’s like a fairy tale!”

“Between 2007 and 2010, Albany’s poverty rate jumped 12 points, to a record high of 39.9 percent. More than two thirds of Albany’s 76,000 residents are black, and since 2010, their poverty rate has climbed even higher, to nearly 42 percent.”

“We think we are the only people in the world who live with threat, but we have to work with regional leaders who will work with us. Bibi is taking the country into unprecedented international isolation.”

Photograph by Adam Golfer

Ratio of money spent by Britons on prostitution to that spent on hairdressing:

“Shelby is waiting for something. He himself does not know what it is. When it comes he will either go back into the world from which he came, or sink out of sight in the morass of alcoholism or despair that has engulfed other vagrants.”